The Kadamba script is one of the oldest of the southern group of South Asian scripts that evolved from the Brahmi script. By 5th century CE it became different from other Brahmi variants and was used in southern Indian states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. It evolved into the Old Kannada script by the 10th century CE and was used to write Kannada and Telugu.[3][4]

Many scripts were derived from Kadamba script, including the Pyu script.

Coin of the Kadambas written in Kadamba script as sri dosharashi and other side Shri shashankaha

sri dosharashi written in Kadamba script on Kadamba coin

During the rule of Kadamba dynasty (325-550), major change in the Brahmi script resulted in the Kadamba Kannada script, letters were shorter and round in shape. During (325 to 1000 AD) the rule of Ganges southern parts of Karnataka the Kannada script used differently (also known as Ganga script) in rock edicts and copper plate inscriptions.
During 6th to 10th century, the Telugu-Kannada alphabet stabilized during the rule of the Chalukyas of Badami from 500-1000.[5]) and Rastrakutas.[6]

The Old Kannada ("Halekannada") alphabet is the continuation of the Telugu-Kannada alphabet used to write Kannada and Telugu.[7]

During the rule of Pallavas, the script accompanied priests, monks, scholars and traders into South East Asia. Pallavas developed a script based on Brahmi, main characteristics of the newer script are aesthetically matched and fuller consonant glyphs. Similar to Pallava script, also visible in the writing systems of Chalukya,[15] Kadamba, Vengi at the time of Ikshvakus. Brahmi design iwas slightly different of the scripts of Cholas, Pandyas and Cheras.
Pallava script very first significant developments of Brahmi in India, take care in combining rounded and rectangular strokes and adding typographical effects, was suitable for civic and religious inscriptions.
Kadamba-Pallava script[16] evolved into early forms of Kannada and Telugu scripts. Glyphs become more rounded and incorporate loops because of writing upon leaves and paper.
The scripts which are descended from the Kadamba-Pallava script are Pyu script,[17]Burmese, Mon, Kawi, Lanna, Tham, Khom, Khmer, Thai, Lao, Sinhalese and Tai Lue.[18][19]

1.
Mongolian writing systems
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Many alphabets have been devised for the Mongolian language over the centuries, and from a variety of scripts. It has spawned several alphabets, either as attempts to fix its perceived shortcomings, or to allow the notation of other languages, such as Sanskrit and Tibetan. Mongol chinese in Inner Mongolia and other parts of China, on the other hand, the Xianbei spoke a proto-Mongolic language and wrote down several pieces of literature in their language. They are believed to have used Chinese characters to phonetically represent Xianbei like the Japanese system of Manyōgana, with only minor modifications, it is used in Inner Mongolia to this day. Its most salient feature is its direction, it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system, as a variant of the traditional script there exists a vertical square script, also called folded script, used e. g. on the Mongolian banknotes. In 1587, the translator and scholar Ayuush Güüsh created the Galik alphabet, inspired by Sonam Gyatso and it primarily added extra letters to transcribe Tibetan and Sanskrit terms in religious texts, and later also from Chinese & Russian. Later some of these letters officially merged to traditional alphabet as group named Galig usug to transcribe foreign word in todays use, the script was used by Kalmyks of Russia until 1924, when it was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet. In Xinjiang, China, the Oirats still use it, the traditional Mongolian alphabet is not a perfect fit for the Mongolian language, and it would be impractical to extend it to a language with a very different phonology like Chinese. Therefore, during the Yuan Dynasty, Kublai Khan asked a Tibetan monk, Drogön Chögyal Phagpa, the script did not receive wide acceptance and fell into disuse with the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368. After this it was used as a phonetic gloss for Mongols learning Chinese characters. However, scholars such as Gari Ledyard believe that in the meantime it was the source of some of the letters of the Korean hangul alphabet. The Soyombo script is a created by the Mongolian monk and scholar Bogdo Zanabazar in the late 17th century. Zanabazar had created it for the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit or Tibetan, aside from historical texts, it can usually be found in temple inscriptions. It also has relevance to linguistic research, because it reflects certain developments in the Mongolian language. At around the time, Zanabazar also developed the Horizontal square script. The scripts applications during the period of its use are not known and it was also largely based on the Tibetan alphabet, read left to right, and employed vowel diacritics above and below the consonant letters. Additionally, a dot was used below consonants to show that they were syllable-final, before the 13th century, foreign scripts had to be used to write the Mongolian language

2.
Nepalese scripts
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The Nepalese scripts are alphabetic writing systems of Nepal. They have been used primarily to write both the national Indo-European language of Nepali plus some Tibeto-Burman languages such as Newari, the older alphabets, known as Brahmic scripts, were in widespread use from the 10th to the early 20th century A. C. E. But have since been supplanted by the modern script known as Devanagari. Of the older scripts, about 50,000 manuscripts written in Nepal Lipi have been archived, outside of Nepal, Brahmi scripts also have been used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, Maithili, Bengali and Braj Bhasha languages. They have reportedly used to inscribe mantras on funerary markers as distant as Japan as well. Nepal or Nepalese script appeared in the 10th century, the earliest instance is a manuscript entitled Lankavatara Sutra dated Nepal Era 28. Another early specimen is a manuscript of a Buddhist text the Prajnaparamita. One of the oldest manuscript of Ramayana, preserved till date, was written in Nepal Script in 1041, the script has been used on stone and copper plate inscriptions, coins, palm-leaf documents and Hindu and Buddhist manuscripts. Among the different scripts based on Nepal script, Ranjana, Bhujinmol, Ranjana is the most ornate among the scripts. It is most commonly used to write Buddhist texts and inscribe mantras on prayer wheels, the popular Buddhist mantra Om mani padme hum (meaning is often written in Ranjana. Besides the Kathmandu Valley and the Himalayan region in Nepal, the Ranjana script is used for sacred purposes in Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Bhutan, Sikkim and Ladakh. The Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibet is ornamented with mantras embossed in Ranjana script, in 1906, the Rana regime banned Nepal Bhasa, Nepal Era and Nepal Lipi from official use as part of its policy to subdue them, and the script fell into decline. Authors were also encouraged to switch to Devanagari to write Nepal Bhasa because of the availability of moveable type for printing, however, the script continued to be used in religious and ceremonial purposes till the 1950s. After the Rana dynasty was overthrown and democracy established in 1951, attempts were made to study and revive the old scripts, and alphabet books were published. Hemraj Shakyavamsha published a book of 15 types of Nepalese alphabets including Ranjana. In 1952, a pressman Pushpa Ratna Sagar of Kathmandu had moveable type of Nepal script made in India, the metal type was used to print the dateline and the titles of the articles in Thaunkanhe monthly. In 1989, the first book to be printed using a computer typeface of Nepal script, Prasiddha Bajracharyapinigu Sanchhipta Bibaran by Badri Ratna Bajracharya, was published. Today, Nepal Lipi has gone out of usage, but it is sometimes used in signage, invitation and greeting cards, letterheads, book and CD covers, product labels

3.
Ranjana alphabet
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The Rañjanā script is an abugida writing system which developed in the 11th century. It is primarily used for writing the Newar language but is used in Buddhist monasteries in India, China, Mongolia. It is normally written from left to right but the Kutakshar form is written from top to bottom and it is also considered to be the standard Nepali calligraphic script. Rañjanā is a Brahmi script and shows similarities to the Devanagari script of North India, the script is also used in most of the Mahayana and Vajrayana monasteries. Along with the Prachalit Nepal alphabet, it is considered as one of the scripts of Nepal and it is the formal script of Nepal duly registered in the United Nation while applying for the free Nation. Therefore, it is vital script to all Nepalese as well, the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra lettered in gold ink by Bhiksu Ananda of Kapitanagar and dating back to the Nepal Sambat year 345 is an early example of the script. These are the rules for vowel diacritics in Ranjana script, there are altogether three rules where the vowel diacritics of क, ग and ब are given. The script is used in Hindu scriptures. However, in late Imperial China, the influence of Tibetan Buddhism popularized the Rañjanā script as well, and so this script is found throughout East Asia. When Rañjanā was introduced to Tibet, it was referred to as Lanydza and this script varies slightly from the standard Rañjanā. In Tibet, the Lanydza variant is used to write original texts of Sanskrit, examples of such texts include the Mañjuśrīnāmasamgīti, the Diamond Sutra and the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. The Lanydza script is found in manuscripts and printed editions of some Sanskrit-Tibetan lexicons like the Mahāvyutpatti. The script is used decoratively on temple walls, on the outside of prayer wheels. Numerous alternative spellings of the term Lanydza exist, including the following and it is only one of the Nepalese scripts that can be written in monogram. After falling into disuse in the century, the script has recently seen dramatically increased use. Regular programs are held in the Kathmandu Valley to promote the script, the script is being endorsed by the Nepal Bhasa movement and is used for headings in newspapers and websites. A Nepalese-German project is trying to conserve the manuscripts of Rañjanā script, a Unicode block for the script has also been proposed by Evertype. The 11-12th Centuries, Collection of Sanskrit Mss, formerly Preserved in the China Ethnic Library Akṣara List of the Sanskrit Inscriptions of Feilai peak, Hangzhou, China Lantsha script

4.
Devanagari
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Devanagari, also called Nagari, is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines. The Nagari script has roots in the ancient Brāhmī script family, the Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE and it was fully developed by about the end of first millennium. Nagari has been the primus inter pares of the Indic scripts, the Devanagari script is also used for classical Sanskrit texts. The Devanagari script is closely related to the Nandinagari script commonly found in ancient manuscripts of South India. Devanagari script has forty-seven primary characters, of which fourteen are vowels, the ancient Nagari script for Sanskrit had two additional consonantal characters. The script has no distinction similar to the capital and small letters of the Latin alphabet, generally the orthography of the script reflects the pronunciation of the language. Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet and it is a descendant of the Gupta script, along with Siddham and Sharada. Medieval inscriptions suggest widespread diffusion of the Nagari-related scripts, with biscripts presenting local script along with the adoption of Nagari scripts, the 7th-century Tibetan king Srong-tsan-gambo ordered that all foreign books be transcribed into the Tibetan language. Other closely related scripts such as Siddham Matrka was in use in Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir. Nāgarī is the Sanskrit feminine of Nāgara relating or belonging to a town or city and it is a phrasing with lipi as nāgarī lipi script relating to a city, or spoken in city. The use of the name devanāgarī is relatively recent, and the older term nāgarī is still common, the rapid spread of the term devanāgarī may be related to the almost exclusive use of this script to publish Sanskrit texts in print since the 1870s. As a Brahmic abugida, the principle of Devanagari is that each letter represents a consonant. This is usually written in Latin as a, though it is represented as in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the letter क is read ka, the two letters कन are kana, the three कनय are kanaya, etc. This cancels the inherent vowel, so that from क्नय knaya is derived क्नय् knay, the halant is often used for consonant clusters when typesetting conjunct ligatures is not feasible. Consonant clusters are written with ligatures, for example, the three consonants क्, न्, and य्, when written consecutively without virāma form कनय, as shown above. Alternatively, they may be joined as clusters to form क्नय knaya, कन्य kanya and this system was originally created for use with the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, which have a very limited number of clusters. When applied to Sanskrit, however, it added a deal of complexity to the script

6.
Tamil-Brahmi
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Tamil-Brahmi, or Tamili, is a variant of the Brahmi script used to write the Tamil language. These are the earliest documents of a Dravidian language, and the script was established in the Chera and Pandyan states, in what is now Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh. Inscriptions have been found on beds, pot sherds, Jar burials, coins, seals. The language is Archaic Tamil, and led to classical Sangam literature, Tamil Brahmi differs in several ways from Ashokan Brahmi. It adds several letters for sounds not found in Prakrit, ṉ ṟ ṛ ḷ and this is unique to Tamil Brahmi and Bhattiprolu among the early Indian scripts. This appears to be an adaptation to Dravidian phonotactics, where words commonly end in consonants, as opposed to Prakrit, where this never occurs. According to Mahadevan, in the earliest stages of the script the inherent vowel was either abandoned, as above, later stages of Tamil Brahmi returned to the inherent vowel that was the norm in India. The origins of the Brahmi in general and Tamil Brahmi specifically are unclear, there are number of inscriptions whose dates have not been settled yet. Nevertheless, a number of theories has been put forward with literary, epigraphic, the received consensus is a 3rd-century post-Ashokan dispersal, but that since the year 2000, there have been two serious candidates for a pre-Ashokan date. The earliest mention of a script for writing the Tamil language is found in the Jaina work Samavayanga Sutta, in the Buddhist work, Lalitavistara, a script called Dravidalipi is mentioned. According to Kamil Zvelebil, Damilli and Dravidalipi are synonymous for Tamil writing, references to writing are also available in early Tamil literature. Tolkappiyam in stanza 16 and 17 mentions dots added to consonants, the author of Tolkappiyam displays awareness of a writing system and the graphic system as he knew it corresponds with later writing systems. Other works such as Tirukkural mentions writing using the word ezhuttu, cilappatikaram mentions kannezhuttu that was used to mark merchandise imported at the port emporium of Kaveripattinam, it also mentions kannezhuttalar or scribes. A reference to palm leaf manuscript writing is found in Nalatiyar, based on the literature analysis, Kamil Zvelebil believes writing was known to Tamil people at least from the 3rd century BCE. The evidence for pre-Ashokan dispersal comes from Sri Lanka and more recently, the earliest well accepted Brahmi inscriptions in South Asia are found in the citadel of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka and are dated to the 4th century BCE. Brahmi developed before the spread of Ashokan missionary activities and spread across South Asia due to trade networks. However, these instances of Brahmi were not considered to be examples of Tamil-Brahmi. In 2013, Rajan and Yatheeskumar published excavations at Porunthal and Kodumanal in Tamil Nadu and their stratigraphic analysis combined with radiocarbon dates of paddy grains and charcoal samples indicated that inscription contexts date to as far back as the 5th and perhaps 6th centuries BCE

7.
Malayalam script
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The Malayalam script is a Brahmic script used commonly to write Malayalam, which is the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 35 million people in the world. Malayalam script is widely used for writing Sanskrit texts in Kerala. Like many other Indic scripts, it is an alphasyllabary, a system that is partially “alphabetic”. The modern Malayalam alphabet has 15 vowel letters,36 consonant letters, the Malayalam script is a Vatteluttu alphabet extended with symbols from the Grantha alphabet to represent Indo-Aryan loanwords. The script is used to write several minority languages such as Paniya, Betta Kurumba. The Malayalam language itself was written in several different scripts. A consonant letter, despite its name, does not represent a pure consonant, for example, ക is the first consonant letter of the Malayalam alphabet, which represents /ka/, not a simple /k/. A vowel sign is an attached to a consonant letter to indicate that the consonant is followed by a vowel other than /a/. If the following vowel is /a/, no sign is needed. The phoneme /a/ that follows a consonant by default is called an inherent vowel, in Malayalam, its phonetic value is unrounded, or as an allophone. To denote a pure consonant sound not followed by a vowel, the following are examples where a consonant letter is used with or without a diacritic. It is written left to right, but certain vowel signs are attached to the left of a consonant letter that it logically follows. In the word കേരളം, the vowel sign േ visually appears in the leftmost position, Malayalam was first written in the Vatteluttu alphabet, an ancient script of Tamil. However, the modern Malayalam script evolved from the Grantha alphabet, both Vatteluttu and Grantha evolved from the Brahmi script, but independently. Vatteluttu is a script that had evolved from Tamil-Brahmi and was used extensively in the southern part of present-day Tamil Nadu. Malayalam was first written in Vatteluttu, the Vazhappally inscription issued by Rajashekhara Varman is the earliest example, dating from about 830 CE. In the Tamil country, the modern Tamil script had supplanted Vatteluttu by the 15th century, a variant form of this script, Kolezhuthu, was used until about the 19th century mainly in the Kochi area and in the Malabar area. Another variant form, Malayanma, was used in the south of Thiruvananthapuram and it later evolved into Tigalari-Malayalam script was used by the Malayali, Havyaka Brahmins and Tulu Brahmin people, but was originally only applied to write Sanskrit

8.
Saurashtra alphabet
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Saurashtra is a script used to write the Saurashtra language. Its usage has declined and Tamil script and Latin are now used more commonly, the Saurashtra Language is written in its own script. Because this is a minority language not taught in schools, people learn to write in Sourashtra Script through Voluntary Organisations like Sourashtra Vidya Peetam, Sourashtra is the popular spelling and it refers to both the Sourashtra language and a person who speaks Sourashtram. Saurashtra is an area in Gujarat State in India, from where the present Sourashtras in Tamil Nadu are traditionally believed to have migrated some centuries back, vrajlal Sapovadia describes the Saurashtra language and language as a hybrid of Gujarati, Marathi & Tamil. The language has had its own script for centuries, the earliest one available from 1880 and this language is not taught in schools and hence had been confined to being merely a spoken language. But many great works like Bhagavath Gita and Tirukkural were translated into Sourashtram and it is now a literary language. Sahitya Akademi has recognized this language by conferring Bhasha Samman awards to Sourashtra Scholars, though some of the books were printed in Devanagari script, it failed to register the growth of the language. For writing Sourashtram using Devanagari Script, we require seven additional symbols to denote the short e and o. We also require one more symbol to mark the sound of half yakara which is peculiar to the Sourashtra language, the books printed in Devanagari Script were discarded because they did not represent the sounds properly. The Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities, Allahabad by his letter No, the Leaders in the Community could not realize the importance of teaching of mother tongue in schools and did not evince interest in production of textbooks in Sourashtram for class use. Of late in internet, many Sourashtra Yahoo groups in their use the Roman script for the Sourashtra language. Now the Sourashtra font is available in computers and this enabled the supporters of Sourashtra Script to print books in its own script, an electronic journal, printed in the Sourashtra Script. One journal, Bhashabhimani, is published from Madurai, in Sourashtra Script, another journal, Jaabaali, is also published by the same Editor of Bhashabhimani from Madurai. The Zeeg Sourashtra script practice Magazine is also published from Madurai only, all the three journals support the Sourashtra script only. There is a journal in Devanagari called palkar Sourashtra Samachar, the letter order of Saurashtra script is similar to other Brahmic Scripts. The letters are vowels, consonants, and the letters which are formed essentially by adding a vowel sound to a consonant. Saurashtra script was added to the Unicode Standard in April,2008 with the release of version 5.1, the Unicode block for Saurashtra is U+A880–U+A8DF

The Cham alphabet is an abugida used to write Cham, an Austronesian language spoken by some 230,000 Chams in Vietnam …

Closeup of the inscription on the Po Nagar stele, 965. The stele describes feats by the Champa kings.

A Champa manuscript recounting the social culture of the Cham community of the early 18th century

The Eastern Cham script. Nasal consonants are shown both unmarked and with the diacritic kai. The vowel diacritics are shown next to a circle, which indicates their position relative to any of the consonants.